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Health & Fitness

Our Love-Hate Relationship With Advertising

Reflections on the art of selling


Do you hate advertising? Before you answer, click here. And here. And here.

OK, back to my question: do you hate advertising? Depends on the ad, I suspect. The above links show you ads I like – they are entertaining and convey a clear message. Those are good qualities in an ad.

It's the idea of advertising that irks many people, i.e., being targeted for a sell job, which is often intrusive. (Can you say pop-up ad?) According to the groundbreaking Consumer Resistance Study conducted by Yankelovich years ago, nearly 70 percent of all consumers "are interested in products and services that would help them skip or block marketing." Yet 55 percent also said they enjoy advertising. So what's going on?

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I tell clients that people hate advertising until they see an ad they love – one that makes them laugh, saves them money, solves a problem that they have, or connects them to a cause.

Advertise derives from the Latin ad- “toward,” + vertere “to turn.” Ads turn our attention to products and services that someone wants us to buy. We love ads that engage us with wit, style, and simplicity. When ads barge in on our lives with carnival-barker copy and pedestrian design, we reach for the remote or turn the page.

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In his great book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser points out that “writing is a craft, not an art. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.” He could have been talking about advertising. Ideas may come in a flash, but there are hundreds of refinements that stand between a creative spark and the ad you eventually see. Pencils have erasers; keyboards have delete keys.

I’m addicted to Mad Men, AMC’s outstanding series featuring the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce ad agency. I love the braided story lines, the brilliant set design, and just about everything Roger Sterling says.

I especially enjoy when Mad Men focuses its lens on the ad industry itself. The show is currently set in 1966, the middle of a golden age on Madison Avenue. If you were an aspiring copywriter or art director during that era, you pored over Doyle Dane Bernbach’s work for Volkswagen and Avis and Alka-Seltzer, which broke new ground for creativity and intelligence. Mad Men has referenced DDB several times, including its famous "Lemon" ad for VW. The agency's creative visionary was Bill Bernbach, who said, “Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.”

When someone says they hate advertising, I'll suggest that they hate bad advertising. Just as they hate bad movies, bad music, bad advice, bad anything.

And then I'll add that I am sure they appreciate good art and good writing, which are at the heart of any good ad.

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